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Leading from Strengths: Harnessing the Power of Positive Leadership

During an exercise to identify signature strengths, a senior banking executive realized that his core strength was linking a passion for the customer with strategic thinking. This was not necessarily in his job description as leader of the bank's wealth management business, but it had been critical to his success. He needed to balance a customer's interests and strategic focus to grow this crucial high-end business. "He was unconsciously competent," says Joseph Ryan, academic director of a new executive program Positive Leadership: Leveraging Strengths to Optimize Performance. "He didn't know these were his signature strengths." By recognizing and capitalizing on their strengths, managers can better use them in their work and also recognize and harness the strengths of others.

The Wharton program is the first to combine the breakthrough research of the Gallup Organization on the importance of playing to your strengths with insights from University of Pennsylvania research on optimism and positive leadership. Ryan notes, for example, that teams that organize around members' individual strengths have double the customer satisfaction scores and higher employee satisfaction and engagement.

"Research from a number of different angles looks at a strength-based view, rather than closing the gaps of deficits or looking at the pathology," says Ryan, founder and president of True North Advisory Group and adjunct professor of management at Wharton. "Leaders figure out what people are good at and then structure teams and processes to leverage that. It is a mindset shift."

Strengths at Three Levels

The Wharton program focuses on strengths at three levels: the individual, the team, and the organization. It helps executives recognize their own strengths, build strong teams, and use the strengths of other employees. Finally, the program helps identify and build the capabilities the organization needs to meet its objectives.

Individual leaders need "to know what they are exceptional at when they are at their best and how to leverage the strategic clarity that they have when leading from strength," Ryan says. "Then, they have to leverage the skills of other people by building teams with complementary skills."

At the company level, a strength-based approach focuses on building organizational capabilities. During the Wharton program, participants learn to structure a "performance-based leadership agenda" to make sure their organizations have the strengths they need to meet their strategic objectives.

"Leaders win the battle but also build the capabilities to win the war," Ryan says. For example, a major insurance company, which had traditionally focused on products, recognized that it needed to give more attention to customer service and marketing capabilities as animated geckos and other innovations shifted the industry. This required hiring people with new sets of strengths.

Not Pollyanna: Building Agility and Resilience

Positive leadership does not mean everyone holds hands and sings "Kumbaya." Instead, leaders bring in people with the right capabilities to succeed and create a positive environment where employees can use their skills. "Positive leadership is a realistic sense of strengths, a combination of optimism and realism. It is not about being a Pollyanna," Ryan says. "In the extreme case, for example, you can have a positive way of firing someone." The Wharton program is practically focused, applying research-based practices to participants' current challenges.

The focus on strengths and positive leadership not only helps the organization succeed today, but also helps prepare it for an uncertain future by building resiliency and agility. In a world of growing complexity, understanding the organization's diverse strengths allows the company to change quickly as the environment changes.

With positive leaders, employees develop a fighting spirit — what General Electric calls "playing the game to win" — and this can help avoid feeling victimized. A positive leader can help employees develop the resilience to meet a merger or go through other changes. "People see change as real, involving gains and losses, so they don't feel victimized," Ryan says.

A strengths-based approach is empowering, bringing emotional energy to the organization. "Most large firms that conduct climate surveys or employee engagement surveys usually find employees dissatisfied on a variety of dimensions," Ryan says. "They are often dissatisfied because managers don't know how to build on their strengths."

Positive leaders engage in real-time talent development, helping team members learn and engage in continuous development. "The best managers you have ever worked for did this intuitively," he says. "They identify the core strengths of their people and continue to stretch those strengths. What we are doing is codifying practices that come out of research and practitioner firms over the last decade."